Self Publishing…The Glamorous Life
I’ve finally finished revising the book – at this point, it is what it is…I think I could just endlessly revise and still find something that needs attention, but at this point, I’m running with it as is. So now I’m at the stage where I’m going to start the publishing process.
Publishing a Physical Book
I’ve opted to use CreateSpace for the physical book and I started the process of getting my book set up. First step, reformat the book for the 6″ x 9″ page side of the book. Check.
Import it into CreateSpace – and find that although I’ve religiously used the formatting like I should, I found I did NOT have it formatted in with each chapter as its own section, with three different headers (first page, odd page, even page). So I went through the book and did all of that.
Import it into CreateSpace – and find that the fonts I used in my book weren’t embedded (and I later find out can’t be because I’ve used Word for Mac).
So now, I have to covert it to a PDF…and I find I no longer have page numbers. I left it there because I still need to scan the artwork and design the cover.
Publishing an iBook
I have a Mac, so a long time ago, I got the iBook Author program. When I opened it at first, I thought I was going to have to cut and paste each section separately to build the book. Turns out, I can just drop the Word document in…except the version of the book I set aside for e-publishing isn’t formatted in sections for each chapter and guess how iBook Author wanted each chapter formatted….you got it, as a unique section…so I decided to quit right there and right this blog.
The Thing Is…
I didn’t go into this completely blind. I had done some research into what was needed and how to best format my book so it would drop into these magical publishing vessels…and I don’t remember a single one telling me the importance of Sections. If only I had known. So now, I either have to re-format the ebook version of my document or make a copy of the physical book version of the document and resize it for normal pages. Either way, it’s fun times with Word…
And For Something We Hope You’ll Really Like…
And as promised, I’m happy to provide another excerpt from the novel. I hope you enjoy it and again, would love to hear any feedback.
Until next time, Happy Journeys!
Mike
Click here for the second excerpt from The Reluctant Captain